Saturday, 29 August 2015

ACCENTUATE THE NEGATIVE.

Last week at Seaham the man in front of me said that he had noticed something peculiar about Bovril. 'Doesn't matter what supermarket you go - Morrisons, Tesco, Sainsbury - it's always the same price,' he said.

'The buggers are fixing it, aren't they?' his friend said. 'It's a bloody cartel, is what it is.'

Hillheads and the romance of the Cup for me today. Meantime here's a thing for WSC.

When doing
the cooking I listen to 5Live. This is partly because I have recently developed
such a Radio Four-intolerance I suffer anaphylactic shock if I hear the words
“With me, Mark Lawson”, but mainly it’s because I find the best way to judge
whether broccoli is cooked is by putting it in the steamer and then counting
off the times Steve Claridge uses the phrase “got the team set up right“. I
find that six usually has it done in the fashionable al dente style, though if
you want the more traditional British “boiled to a slop” you may have to go as
high as 35.

Like
everything these days, with the exception of my own life, 5Live is thrillingly interactive.
This means that at some point the presenter will call a halt to Danny Mills and
read out a text from John on the M25 “who says “These so-called fans should
stop complaining and support the team”. Whenever I hear this comment I confess
I am puzzled. To a hefty number of football fans – possibly even a majority
-moaning, grumbling and chanting
“You’re getting sacked in the morning” at the manager is supporting their team.

Part of the
problem seems to be that too many people think the verb to support only has one
meaning. This is not the case. Just as there is a big difference between
playing football, playing the fool and playing a trout (insert your own “though
not much in the case of England” joke here), so there is a vast divergence
between, say, supporting your children and supporting a football team. One involves building self-confidence,
nurturing, providing unconditional laundry. Supporting a football team, on the
other hand, well, that is an altogether different business.

In August I was
at a wedding of an old school friend in Devon. Another of our former classmates
had flown in from New England. He’d moved to the US from Archway when he was
twenty and been there ever since. In three decades his London accent has merged
into Massachusetts.

We were
sitting on the terrace of the hotel taking about football. “Gary Neville’s
analysis is great,” my friend said, “I love Gary Neville”. I said I didn’t know
you could get Sky in the US. “I can’t,” he said, “I watch clips on Youtube”.

His wife who
was sitting beside him raised her eyebrows, “We have very long winters.” she said.

“Gary
Neville’s fantastic. I just wish he hadn’t played for Man U” my friend said.

“He gets to watch
them play every five years,” his wife said, “But he still loves Arsenal”.

A Saturday
lunchtime a month or so later, I’m on the Tyne and Wear Metro. At a
gaunt looking man in his late fifties, wearing a grey tweed coat and a black-and-white
scarf got on. A bloke in a Newcastle shirt
already in the carriage greeted him warmly. “How are doing, nowadays?” He
asked. The other man smiled, “Much better, much better,” he said, “I had the
six month check and I got the all-clear.”

The other
man expressed his happiness at the good news. “Aye,” the first man said and
fingered the black-and-white scarf around his neck, “Mind I’ve still got the
agony of watching these bastards”.

The other
man grimaced, “It’s been painful,” he said, “Really painful”.

“If I hadn’t been
to the doctors that much recently,” the first man said, “I’d be round there now
begging some tablets for it” the first man said. “Something to wean me off
them, like.”

The second
man said, “Boots the Chemist ought to make some patches”.

There
followed a brief exchange in which the pair tried to raise the mood by talking
about Paolo Di Canio, but it was plain their hearts weren’t in. The train
pulled into Monument. “You getting off here?” the man in the black-and-white
scarf asked. The other man shrugged, sighed and said, “I was hoping not too.
But, aye, come on, let’s go and take our punishment like men”.

Were these
men fans? Definitely. Yet anyone listening to them would have come away with
the impression that the only time they’d get behind their team was if they were
perched on the edge of a cliff and only needed a nudge to send them over and
into the sea below.

Perhaps it’s
an age thing, but to me this sort of mordant exasperation, a feeling of being
driven mad, seems to me to be as much supporting a football team as naming your
children after the forward line, or getting a portrait of the club’s all-time
greatest player tattooed on your back. Yet so far Mark “Chappers” Chapman has never
interrupted John Motson in mid-chuckle to say, “And Martin on Twitter says, “Why
can’t these so-called supporters stop clapping and cheering the side’s every
touch and just sit with their arms folded, glowering and making the occasional
tutting noise?”.

Perhaps no
one sends in such messages. In the interests of balance they really should. And
you know, if I didn’t have watch the carrots I’d do it myself.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.